Overwriting is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. Yes, it’s bad if it’s still present in a completed novel, and it’s bad if the writer is incapable of recognizing it, but it can actually serve a purpose in early drafts.

I always think of the first draft (and sometimes the second and third and fourth, depending on how badly I messed up the first) as telling the story to myself. It’s not really meant to be seen by other people (except maybe especially patient CPs who are willing to help me work out major plot kinks). It is meant to help me figure things out.

By ‘things’, of course, I don’t just mean the plot. The first draft is also for exploring characters and the world they inhabit, because yes, worldbuilding is necessary even in non-SFF novels – after all, not everyone lives in the town or city in which your book is set. And this is where many people get caught up in overwriting. There are certain details about your world or your characters that are absolutely vital to the story. There are a lot of details that are really, truly not no matter how much you may love them or how interesting you think they are.

Sometimes it can be hard to figure out which details are which, particularly if you attempt to sort them out before you start writing. I, for one, consistently find around Chapter Three that Detail B really was important and should have been included early on, and then around Chapter Fifteen that Detail A wasn’t as vital as I’d thought it was. While it would be nice to have determined all that before I started writing, I usually can’t.

But you know what? That’s okay. That’s what first drafts are for.

So what’s my point? Don’t worry about your first (or second or third or fourth) draft being neat and tidy. Don’t worry about the fact that you’re 15000 words over your predetermined count or that your first ten pages are all scene-setting or that you’ve written a prologue you know is completely unnecessary.

That stuff is important. That stuff helps you to flesh out a world, to figure out which details will make it feel real to the reader, to determine what’s necessary for your reader to understand and what’s just interesting background fluff. That stuff is what will make your story come alive in later drafts, even if it’s no longer on the page.

So overwrite. Indulge the impulse to spend an entire chapter in one character’s head. Spend a couple of pages meandering through the streets of your setting.

Hi adventurers! I hope you’ve got big Halloween plans this weekend! (I’m out of town visiting a good friend and you better believe we have plans! Hind your candy, hide your pumpkins!)

Today I wanted to talk about getting unstuck. Sometimes I have writers’ block, I’ll admit it. And sometimes a writing prompt or even a great story I am already working on isn’t enough to get me unstuck. However, I’ve got a few tools from my graduate course in deliberate creativity that might help.

I always thought I was a naturally creative individual but my course really helped me to see the other avenues of creativity that I can work on and improve. If you find the tools below helpful, I’ve included some links at the bottom for finding out more about deliberate creativity and the department in which I took my course.

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Idea Box: this is a tool for randomly combining options and it almost always sparks some kind of idea in me. You fill in a grid like the one below and then combine the options in random and interesting ways (you can use a number cube to push your limits). Use the selected elements for some flash fiction (or maybe more!).

SCAMPER: This tool works for rethinking something you’re already working on. It’s an acronym for Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Magnify/Modify, Put to other uses, Eliminate, and Rearrange. I like to use post-its and big stretch of blank wall with this one.

I attended a fantastic writing retreat this past weekend and one of the sessions dealt with using acting techniques to improve your writing. It was fascinating. I learned so much from that session that I intend to put those ideas into practice straight away. Here is a condensed version of that talk given by Ginny Sain.

“Generality is the enemy of all art.” – Stanislavski

When creating your characters, you want to move from the general to the specific.

How?

By paying attention to their inner lives and motivations of your characters in every scene. And this should be done FOR EVERY CHARACTER.

When an actor prepares for a new role, they get to know their character intimately – what motivates them, how they move about in space, what they like and don’t like – they slip into their character’s skin to portray them in a believable manner. The actor inhabits every inch of that character’s psyche. And they do this before they even step foot on the stage.

This can feel like a daunting task. Impossible even. So how do they do it?

They break down the play into moments – or beats – and figure out what’s driving their character’s behavior from moment to moment. Beats are manageable chunks even smaller than scenes. Some obvious beats include when a character enters or exits or when there’s a shift in conversation, or when new information has been revealed. Once the beats are identified, they then decide what the character’s objective, obstacle, and action is for each beat.

Objective – This is what your character wants. Each character has one main “superobjective” that spans the entire work and many smaller objectives that lead toward the “superobjective”. The path a character takes as they move through these smaller objectives is called the “through line”. Each character should have an objective for every beat they are on stage. The objective should be active and directed toward the other characters. Objectives seek to change things.

“I want get away from him and leave this room.”

Obstacle – What is keeping your character from getting what they want. These can be internal or external. Or both. This struggle is what makes the story interesting.

“I can’t leave because he locked the door.”

Action – What your character does to overcome his or her obstacle. There are usually three possible outcomes: the character will give up, overcome the obstacle, or plow through and ignore it. How they react shows what a character is made of, reveals a lot about that character.

“I jump out the window.”

This is a wonderful way of looking at your story. Focusing on what each character wants as you write each moment – which may be completely opposite things – can make for much more interesting writing.

Another great idea gleaned from this talk is to think about what is happening for each character immediately before a scene begins. Don’t write it into the story, but be aware of the head space of each character as you put them into the next situation. This gives momentum into the scene and adds inner life to the characters. A scene can also become more fleshed out when this is used.

Think about the physical sense of setting and how your character moves around in a scene or interacts with objects. Be thoughtful about how your characters move around in the world. Make their movements purposeful, not just because you need a beat in your dialogue.

A note on dialogue…

“Dialogue is the brush playwrights paint with.” – Ginny Sain

Consider looking at your dialogue as a spoken scene. Does this work as an acted scene? Listen for tempo, rhythm, clarity. If you can’t hear the musical rhythm of the character, revise!

If you struggle with dialogue, consider reading more plays to learn how to write better dialogue. It’s all show and no tell. you can find a great selection of plays at your local library or at the Dramatists Play Service website.

I hope this gives you another insightful way to develop your own characters.

Well, summer is officially over – Autumn Equinox today, and here in the depths of mid-Wales, the weather has been suitably cold and rainy. I am, as usual, writing my post late on the day it’s due, but I have some slight excuses: I got home from three months in Italy a week ago, had a friend staying until Saturday, developed a cold that gave me a fever of 39 (102 F) for two days, and (on a much more lovely note) witnessed my sister’s marriage yesterday. Now I’m sitting on my brother’s couch with tea and leftover cake, his three-year-old is in bed, and I’m finally able to crack on with it.

I felt a bit overwhelmed trying to put a post on writing craft together, if I’m honest, because for the last three months I’ve done almost no writing and am feeling very out of practice. (Maybe I should have written a post on the age-old craft of Not-Writing instead, but I think we’re probably all experts in that anyway.) However, one of the things I am and will be doing is trying to go back to my ‘finished’ manuscript for another round of edits following a meeting with my agent (yes, the agent is a new development, and yes, I casually dropped that in there). And while that’s largely beyond the research stage, it is a thoroughly historical novel, so my head is in that space again, and I thought I’d share with you some research techniques I find useful (bearing in mind that I’m probably not a very conventional researcher). I know a lot of people use historical details in fantasy writing as well as actual historical stories, so hopefully this may be of interest to the fantasy folk too!

I studied history for my undergrad degree (it was what would have been my major if I’d been studying in the USA), so in many ways I’ve got an advantage. Not necessarily in how much I already know (although there’s sometimes that too), but in that I spent three years being taught how to do historical research by top experts in exactly that.

Academic research, though, isn’t quite the same as story research. In some ways it’s easier – you have far more leeway in terms of making mistakes, inventing things to fill gaps, and generally using your artistic license. In many ways it’s harder, because the kind of detail you need to know for a story isn’t always the kind of detail readily available. I’ve had to learn not only how to adapt the skills I learnt as a student, but also when and how to ditch them altogether and do the exact opposite of what my tutors taught me (see Point Seven).

All of the following, of course, are only tips based on what I find useful myself – different things will work for different people!

Beware of big thick academic Histories. They’re mostly waffly analysis; great for essays, less so for stories. You will find great tomes of theories about the whys and wherefores of the fall of the Roman Empire, for example, but among those you will struggle to find any information about what the average citizen of a specific small town in northern Italy ate for breakfast in that period. Read the chapter lists to get an idea of the real content, and then read the introductions and conclusions of the relevant chapters. (Also read the footnotes. If they’re mostly referencing primary sources, they’re going to be way more interesting than the ones that mostly reference other people’s analytical works on the same subject.)

Know your research questions, and choose your reading accordingly. Of course, in early stages and when you’re looking for general inspiration, read as widely as you can about anything that interests you. But it’s easy to get bogged down, so try and hone what you’re looking for. Think about the things that are actually going to be relevant to your story and your characters. My manuscript is set in WW2, but I didn’t need to do detailed research on the entire war, only on what was going on in Britain in the summer of 1940 – and then, only really the things that were likely to affect a sixteen-year-old girl living in a farflung part of the countryside. I had a general timeline of the war to refer to, but otherwise the things I needed to know about were things like egg rationing and upland sheep farming calendars, not Hitler’s policies or occupied France, or even the London Blitz.

Know your period broadly before you start. Don’t stress over it, because the story is the main thing, and mistakes can be put right in later drafts. But don’t go in blind because some mistakes can be put right more easily than others, and if your big error is something your plot hinges on, you could have a problem. At least make sure you have a timeline of important dates, and have done some reading around the subject. One perfectly acceptable way to do that is:

Read other (well-researched) fiction set in the right time/place. Check reviews, bibliographies and author information to see whether they appear to have done their homework, but generally you can tell a lot by how much detail they put into everyday life, people’s clothes and food and manners etc. (The same goes for well-researched films and TV programmes, but those are harder to find.) Even better, if your period is more recent, read books written (and set) then. There’s no risk of terrible inaccuracy, and you’ll also get a much better feel for things like how people talked to each other, and the language they used.

The internet is your friend. Just as with any novel research, we history lovers find ourselves looking up some flipping obscure things at times. Looking for that in a book is like looking for a needle in a haystack, but on the internet you have Google. There are also a lot of truly fascinating pieces of research that are only published as articles in journals, so the internet is the easiest way to access them. If you’re part of a university or college you probably have access to the JSTOR library through your university account. If not, using Google Scholar will find you free academic journal articles, and they’re both easily searchable. Someone, somewhere, will probably have done the research you’re looking for; you just need to find where they wrote it up.

If nobody has done it, do it yourself. Go back to primary sources. Unless your characters are historians, you probably don’t need all the endless analysis and debate around the facts; you just want the stuff that was happening there on the ground. Newspaper reports. Census information. Petty court records. Adverts. People’s letters. Personal anecdotes. The list could go on. Again, there is so much online you barely need to stir from your chair, but if you’re able to visit your location in person, you may be able to find more.

Sometimes Wikipedia is your best resource. You would not believe how long I spent reading endless original legal documents and trying to get my head around the UK Education Acts of the 20th Century and what they would have meant for my character’s schooling, only to find that Wikipedia has a neat summary of the entire thing that made it clear in about five minutes. Check the sources if you can – as with any non-academic work you find online – but as a starting point, you can’t usually beat it.

Since I was last around, things have been a bit busy. I launched an anthology in London (back in May), traveled to the West Coast to visit my brother, was named valedictorian for my master’s class and “had” to go back to England (oh darn), and started working with an agent on my manuscript. Very exciting stuff!

That last one? While you’re reading this, I’ll be frantically editing away to get a fully revised, 100% more awesome version of Illuminate over to said agent. And as I struggle to cut a full 30k from my story to bring it into reasonable parameters, one thing has become very clear to me:

I have a lot of crutch words.

What are crutch words? They’re the filler. The excess jam. The bloated brain. The wordy worms.

There are several fairly universal crutch words (I’m looking at you, “that”), but every writer has their own set of crutches. Heck, every story has its own set of crutches. So, what can a girl do?

Identify Your Crutch Words

I use two primary internet resources for this: word cloud generators (pictured above) and Word Frequency Counter. There will of course be some words you can ignore (the, he, she, [your MC’s name]—the word cloud generators will let you remove these from the count if you want). But if you scan through it, you will come across some interesting themes.

For instance, in my word cloud (which was for an older draft) the word “hand” is used more frequently than my antagonist’s name. “Hand” is definitely a crutch word for me. I love hands. I’m obsessed. It’s weird.

Write out a list of your crutch words, and maybe look at these resources for more ideas:

Exterminate! Exterminate!

So you have your list. Now it’s time to start revising. You have a couple options for this:

Print it out. When your writing is on paper, the flaws are revealed in ways that just don’t come across on the screen. To mix stuff up, try changing the line spacing or margins—this will force you to look at it in an even more different way. Keep your list handy and read with an eye for the crutch words.

Use Word’s Replace function. Put your manuscript in Word and use Find+Replace. Put the same word into both Find and Replace, but change the formatting preferences in the Replace bar to select “highlight.” This will light your pages up like a Christmas tree or other similarly bright object.

Listen to it. Read it out loud, or have a friend (or robot—robot friend?) read it to you. Again, keep that list handy and try to be aware of how much those words are popping up.

To clarify: Not all crutch words have to be entirely eliminated from your manuscript. I certainly am not going to cut or change every reference to hands in my WIP. But I do try to make sure I never repeat the same word within the same page (unless it is for intentional rhythm or mirroring) and that it is only repeated a few times in the same chapter.

You’ll have to trust your gut to feel out how much repetition is too much, and when the words that could enhance your story actually bog it down.

What are some of your crutch words? Do you have other methods for dealing with them? Share in the comments!